Perelman rejected the fields medal as he felt his contributions to solving the Poincare conjecture were no greater than Richard Hamilton's, since Hamilton pioneered the Ricci Flow that Perelmen build upon. I was a student in Richard Hamilton's class at Columbia (Differential Geometry) right around this time in '07. Not only was he utterly brilliant, but like Perelman didn't seem to have the Millenium Prize or credit for solving Poincare on his mind when we approached him during office hours. For a lot of these great mathematicians truth seems to be the greater reward :)
Not only did he publish it for free, but he also refused to accept a $1 million prize. This man is a rare specimen among the many self aggrandizing humans we typically see.
Its funny how a guy achieves something so incredible and unique, something that has puzzled humanitys best minds for a century and everydoby is amazed not by that fact, but by the fact that he refused some money :) I mean solving Poincare is hard, but REFUSING A MILLION DOLLARS thats impossible! XD
Imagine that narrative was false and perpetuated about him to cover up him trying to get the work published while society tried to steal it and discredit him
William Thurston on Perelman: "Perelman's aversion to public spectacle and to riches is mystifying to many. I have not talked to him about it and I can certainly not speak for him, but I want to say I have complete empathy and admiration for his inner strength and clarity, to be able to know and hold true to himself. Our true needs are deeper - yet in our modern society most of us reflexively and relentlessly pursue wealth, consumer goods and admiration. We have learned from Perelman's mathematics. Perhaps we should also pause to reflect on ourselves and learn from Perelman's attitude toward life."
Beautifully said. Perelman apparently has an IQ well over 200... his philosophy must have some merit if he can be this happy and indifferent to the trappings that catch the rest of us.
The fact one of the most prestigious universities, supposedly an avatar of intellectual thought and intelligence, asks one of the greatest living mathematicians on earth for a resume just after he gave lectures to Princeton professors explaining his proof which they could not completely follow or understand by themselves, exposes everything that has gone wrong in the hallowed halls of learning.
this is Princeton dude, not some random uni, in math, Princeton is about the strongest uni there is. All the faculties there are basically geniuses in their own right.
Actually in addition to publishing their results in a journal, most authors do upload the preprints to arXiv, whats different in Perelman's case is that he did not bother publishing his results in any journal. Also, note that there are open access journals, some demand certain amount of money from authors, some dont.
The publication/textbook/conference industry is a sham. Some journals charge thousands of dollars in fees, which effectively shuts out anyone without grant funds. The same goes for many of the top conferences.
Western culture is all materialism, and money is first. The people who think used to be valued. Now people who make money or are famous are portraited as valuable. Professors are afraid for their positions, the contracts are one year based, students dictate what they want, and the job of a professor is to bring funding to the universities or being a clown to the students. Look at how the society treats those who made machine learning and revolutionized artificial intelligence. Shouldnt the professor be rich instead of universities? Who does the research and the teaching? The administrative departments get all the credit. To go to the university you should pay a price of a house. Companies like ETS have like 100 English certificates which are worse each year. GRE has become a kids play. Olyimpiads are not discussed, the level of education is falling every year. Publishing has become a joke, everybody replicating old research and citing friends. This has led to a mafia that cares little about science. The industry discovers every day that graduates know too little that it is better to offer short courses and hire people who can make the products that are replica of each other. No value for novelty. Disney copying writers, Garcia Marques copying William Faulkner and winning Nobel for it. Obama got his Nobel when he was recently elected. I could go on. The money-centered culture is a parasite to art, science and being human in general. Goodbye the days that philosophers and scientists were a credit to a society and they were respected for that. Check out the movie "idiocrocy".
I have zero problem with the peer review system, but the publishers like Elsevier have always enraged me. They are companies that create zero content themselves, make the authors pay for the publications cost though their respective institutions like federal grants, and make the same group of scientists serve as unpaid editorial staff only to then overcharge for it to the point of making it impossible for the public - who payed for most of it - to read it without access to an academic library. In the digital age this not only makes no sense, but is unjust. And to add the last insult to injury - about the time I started publishing papers the authors even started doing all the typesetting themselves digitally. That is quite a racket! I think that is the purest definition of a parasite - an organism that has found a way to live off of the work of others without contributing anything themselves. So I do like in principle that the mathematical result of the century was dropped in an online archive with an implicit big Perelman middle finger to those guys. It does create some other long term problems with signal to noise, but nothing that couldn’t be solved with some concerted effort. But I look forward to the day when maybe my grandchildren can piss on the graves of some of these publishers.
The use public funds and institutions to research these matters... then privatize the results of any interesting findings... Interesting racket indeed. Privatize the gains, socialize the losses is a concept that spreads far
He also felt that it was inappropriate to take full credit for solving this problem as he considered Richard Hamilton’s work to be equally (or perhaps even more) instrumental in solving this problem.
@@markdowding5737 because it was Perelman who SOLVED the conjecture. Thousands of mathematicians contributed to this solution, and if we start splitting the money between all the dead and living people who made this solution possible, Perelman will hardly get a dollar left. Because Hamilton based his works on Thurston's works etc. on and on to the past ages. No one starts the solution from scratch.
@@kurtistrent4772 Scientific prizes are often split between multiple scientists who did relevant work to the topic in question. The Nobel prizes of Chemestry and Physics often have multiple winners every year. I think Hamilton deserved part of the recognition since Perelman essentialy built his proof based on Hamilton's discoveries and insights
There is no denial to your statement. Fear of contradiction is increasing at a rapid pace in the people sitting in the upper echelon. Selective data is being used to frame narratives. False is being covered in all sorts of fabrics to be presented as truth.
Although him refusing the awards is odd, I still don't get why him publishing the papers on arxiv for free would be weird. The alternative would be to either give the rights to a publisher to paywall it, or use government funds to pay a publisher to call experts to review it without even paying those experts. So, instead of going through this process, he simply put it there, and now that everyone knows the proof is correct, what's the issue? Seems to me everyone else in academia does it wrong, not Perelman.
When you know the truth, the truth will set you free. [ Iehoshua. Iahudi. The Bible. -John 8:32]. Perlman found his truth and he is free. Please let him be.
Never gonna happen. I agree though it would be awesome. But several people have tried much harder than Lex to speak with him. He’s not a fan of mainstream academia and is somewhat eccentric and reclusive.
Lex do you think if you were really good at the marketing and money and stuff that you'd feel the same way? As someone who shares your intuitions about money/business/marketing vs. purity of the pursuit, I do catch myself wondering if I hate them not because those games are bad but I'm bad at them
After Perelman published his proof it took years for the very few mathematicians capable of understanding it several years to verify it--Perelman well understood that if he had submitted it to a mathematical journal it would be subjected to peer review and would have been thrown into the trash bin because the usual peer reviewers are totally incapable of understanding the proof, and even much less capable of taking the responsibility of accepting it for publication.
Luís Batalha is wrong about the reason why Perelman rejected the fields medal, the truth is that Perelman believed his contribution was equal to Hamilton and they refused to include Hamitlon in this prize
Lol when you google the term "Russian Mad Scientist", the face of Grigori Perelman is exactly what your mind expects to pop up 😂 Bro has decoded the Matrix and putting Easter Eggs in it for us
Perelman rejected the prize as he was disappointed in the math community for being a leecher and consumerist; which was evident as Chinese mathematicians and others tried to take credit as co-authors (by explaining bits of his paper's arguments as his paper was a bit terse) for solving the conjecture AFTER HE PUBLISHED THE PAPER. He rejected the field medal for his impression that mathematicians no longer cared for the truth but medals, honor, limelight, etc. mathematicians are usually non-confronting but the act of scavenging the limelight of another man's work is really disappointing even to me a student as I've always regarded mathematicians to be a level above the rest of us
@@leonidk5822 Lex is interesting and he is Russian. Lex is also an expert in the field of machine intelligence. If Perelman gives lectures that means he isnt a complete social recluse, so why isnt an interview on the cards
@@scroopynooperz9051 Григорий Перельман читал лекции для аудитории, состоящей исключительно из математиков. На них не допускались журналисты. И при этом он был принципиально против не только записи этих лекций на видео, но даже на диктофон. Он не раздаёт интервью никому. И Лекс ему был бы не интересен.
Of course he published them for free, this is standard practice. Everyone in math publishes their work for free. In fact, you can’t make money off of your scientific article.
Interesting discussion towards the end. Think about Shohei Ohtani in Dec. 2023, deferring most of his salary to the future. It’s not money that spoils the athlete - it is a choice of the athlete. Is tough but it is still a choice they have, to allow the money to just the waters or not. And Ohtani showed that you can have the money and not let it spoil you.
